Wednesday, April 01, 2009

As we all know, it's cause for major, major crisis when we run out of the corn at Toro. You can read about my past painful experiences with this here and here.

In fact, while I was filling in as a manager at Toro, I had to make an emergency corn run to Stop & Shop at 8:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, just to avoid such a disaster. I called the Mathematician from South Bay Center to have him help calculate how much corn to buy. My shopping cart was half full of corn and nothing else, causing other shoppers to gawk and even talk about me loudly in Spanish in the check out line.

For Toro waitstaff, running out of corn is pretty much the worst thing ever. 4 out of 5 tables bitch about it, and some guests even get up and walk out, even after waiting half an hour for a table. And while I love and respect our chef and think he has done some amazing things for the restaurant since he came on board in November, I'm not so sure about his latest menu change:

"As of tomorrow, we're only going to be serving the corn seasonally at Toro, in a move to exclusively support local farmers," Jamie told us at pre-meal."

"But...but...but...people freak out if they can't have the corn!" Juan said.

"They can still have the corn," Jamie said, "just seasonally. In late July, August, and September. It's something I feel really strongly about, and Ken and I think it's going to be really great." He was visibly annoyed, so we all just nodded: yes, chef.

I don't know about the other servers, but I am mentally preparing for riots. Big, hunger-induced, angry riots.